“My Healthy Body Can” is the title of Project Heal’s new campaign. In conjunction with Straight Curve Film, the organization is encouraging participants celebrate their recovered bodies by posting pictures of themselves engaging in various (presumably physical) activities that they are now healthy enough to enjoy. The endeavour and its endeavourees are admirable, but there are some very obvious issues here.

This is a remarkably ableist, exclusive, and offensive campaign. With its tagline, “My Healthy Body Can” this movement neglects and excludes a huge portion of the recovery community–the chronically ill, the disabled, individuals who settled at unconventional body weights, and those with irreparable damage done by their eating disorder. What about them? Their unhealthy bodies can’t. Does that somehow disqualify them from celebration? Does that deprive them of support? Does that discredit their achievements? Does that discount their recoveries?

It shouldn’t. They have had to fight even harder for recovery. Treatment resources are harder to come by, care is more expensive, certain problems are taken less seriously, and every day is a struggle to balance the mental and physical components of their recovery. Some of of them will never recover from their eating disorders; some of them literally can’t.

I am one of those people–one of the unhealthy, one of the excluded, one of the perpetually sick. I will never recover from my eating disorder. I have incurable cardiovascular, endocrine, reproductive, digestive, and metabolic damage from ten years of severe anorexia. I suffered a heart attack that has led to irreversible myocardial tissue death and dangerous tachyarrhythmias, which will only get worse; I do not get periods, have a less than optimal body fat percentage, and can never bear children; I eat a specialized diet of 4000 calories a day, catered to my numerous acquired food tolerances and permanently low electrolytes, to barely maintain a below minimum BMI; I see doctors weekly, exercise daily, and take medications (nearly) hourly to keep my liver running, my kidneys working, and my heart beating, but, despite all that, I will someday need transplants anyway. My body is not and never will be healthy, and because of that, there are many things I cannot do. Maybe you can ride your horses and do your yoga (thank you, Amalie Lee for that gem!), but I’ll be here in a hospital, hooked up to a heart monitor, trying not die.

So, Project Heal, I’ll ask you once again. What about us? I see you’ve replied to your dissenters with a copy-and-pasted link to a tokenistic (phrase borrowed from the wonderful Michelle Elman) blog post, but I think I speak for everyone when I say, that isn’t good enough. Please apologize, please revise your campaign slogan, and better yet, please help us. We want and need, deserve and demand change. Increased support and resources for the minority members of the eating disorder recovery community–for those of us who don’t have the perfect, conventional recovery–are essential. Our unhealthy bodies can’t, but we matter, too; we deserve help, too; and most importantly, we can recover, too.